One Thousand Hours

Last week I overheard my aunt tell my mom that she had been quoted in my aunt's congregation's church service. My mom created a program for parents of preschool age children to help them prepare their children for kindergarten (Time Together...check it out). After three decades of teaching preschool and kindergarten, my mom is pretty much the best in the biz.

"She said--over the pulpit!--that you said that it takes a thousand books to prepare your child for Kindergarten," my aunt related.

At this point, my eyes widened a little bit. I mean, I read to my children daily--as often as I remember or they bring me books, but even then, I doubt we are close to a thousand books. Unless you count the number of times I've read Pinkalicious or Dr. Suess's ABC Book or The Little Blue Truck.

My mom reacted with a lopsided, half-smile, "Well, that's close to what I said. It takes a thousand hours of lap time to prepare your children for kindergarten, but a thousand books is good too, I guess."

This comment ate away at me for the rest of the evening and the whole next morning. Somewhere in there, I convinced myself that she had said ten thousand hours and I realized that something about the math was off there.

Is that even possible? I wondered as I opened the day counter app on my phone. Doing some rough (and I mean rough) math in my head, I realized that my daughter will be somewhere around 2,000 days old when she enters kindergarten.  Even I could do that math...10,000 hours in 2,000 days...FIVE HOURS A DAY?!

We are so behind! I panicked. Then I realized that since it was a government holiday, my mom was actually home and not in the middle of teaching five-year-olds geometry, so I called her.

"That quote from sacrament meeting yesterday?" I rattled quickly, knowing I was interrupting my parents' When Calls the Heart marathon, "was that ten thousand hours or one thousand hours? Because I think we're a little behind."

At this point, she just laughed at me. "One thousand hours."

I let out a sigh of relief. "Okay, but still..." I did some quick math in my head. "That's more like half an hour a day instead of twenty minutes, and we've got an extra six months before she starts kindergarten."

She confirmed that this was true. She laughed a little as she told me that she tells parents that as soon as they bring the baby home from the hospital they need to pull out the books.

"How does that work when your child's attention span is barely thirty seconds?" I asked. "Does it count if they are playing in the same room and you read out loud to them?"

She pointed out that my daughter will sit through a book now, and I clarified that my son, on the other hand, will not, and my daughter only started listening to books in their entirety within the last year.

I am failing my children. I'm staying home to avoid this kind of situation, and I'm still failing my children.

I think this was the point when my mother mournfully put Hope Valley on hold and switched her voice into "pep talk mode."

"You're doing better than you think you are," she told me. I only half believed her, because she's my mother, so she has to say that. Even as I ended the call, half an hour later, I felt unsettled and gathered my children on the couch and read them four Llama Llama books in one sitting. (Well, one sitting for me. The boy was up and down at least a dozen times, and the girl took a few breaks to rescue her toys from her brother).

"Mom?" she said after we finished the last book and I reached for another one. "I done."

And she was gone. And I gave up.

Then, today, when she told me the same thing about quiet time and I made her wait ten more minutes so I could finish the season 3 premiere of When Calls the Heart, she asked me if we could play a game. Not up for another frustrating round of Candy Land where she breaks all the rules and I land on the peanut every other turn, I suggested we pull out the Time Together kit that my mom let us borrow.

Before this afternoon, all I knew about the kit was that it came in an orange bag, contained a white board, and somehow magically would help me prepare my daughter to read, write, listen, and do math.

I was surprised, then, when I pulled out item after item of activities we had already done, some that we do daily. Nothing the kit contained was new to my daughter. I thought we'd barely be able to do one activity before her brother woke up; instead, we breezed through them and I had to stop her from doing everything in one day.

Maybe I am doing better than I think I am. I finally started to believe it. After three weeks of noticing all the ways my daughter seemed to be behind her peers--and all of my frustrations because there seemed to be so little I could do to help her that I wasn't already doing--I finally felt a renewal of hope as I leafed through the parent papers in the kit and landed on "Age Appropriate Skills & Activities for 3-4 yr. old Children."

• "A three minute attention span and minimal understanding of yesterday and tomorrow." She has those down, I thought. Check.
• "Can hop on one foot and walk in a line." It's not pretty, but she can do that. Check.
• "Can follow simple directions and accept suggestions." After some negotiating, yes, she does that. Check.

The list continued: "Can put on shoes.... Understands some dangers.... Identifies common colors.... Still doesn't cooperate or share well.... Can sort of dress,,,. May prefer one parent (often the opposite sex). Knows whether a boy or a girl."

Yes, she can put on her own boots. Not always on the right feet, but she does it by herself. She understands dangers enough to warn me when her brother is getting into trouble. She knows all of her colors and makes a big deal of matching, creating "patterens" and making sure she gives us our favorite color of plastic IKEA plate when she sets the table.  She definitely lives life on her own terms, and she knows the word "cooperate" because she's heard me ask her to do so several times a day. Just yesterday she explained to her father that she had "lost the pwvilege" of going on a walk because she misbehaved at church. "Can sort of dress" is a good explanation of her Fancy Nancy clothing styles and ability to somewhat pull her pants up after using the bathroom. Oh, that's right, I forgot--they're leggings not pants. Definitely prefers her father (who knew being a Daddy's girl was a developmental milestone?). Knows the difference between her and her brother; we've had the "that's his peanut" conversation more than once.

So, yeah, I guess we are doing better than I think we are. 

And those thousand hours of time together? I'm learning that they come in small, 2-3 minute increments, like when my son pinches his fingers in the door and comes and sits on my lap for a cuddle before going about his daily, havoc-wreaking business. Or when my daughter asks me to play pretend and informs me that she's the mom and "I's the girl" and she helps me dish up my purple sghetti and cuts up my food for me before tucking me into bed on the couch with a "couple a books." Or how when we read Pinkalicious she fills in the words whenever I pause. Or how my son will run to me, carrying Llama Llama Time to Share and starts yelling "Llama Ama Mama!" Or how my daughter points out to me that yesterday the mountains were blue and today they are white and how come? Or how, when you ask my son what Mr. Brown says, he yells at the top of his voice, "MOOOO!"

1,000 hours. 60,000 minutes. 360,0000 seconds = the amount of time I spend being my child's first exposure to learning. 

It's so much less time than I thought I had, and yet we are doing so much more with it than I ever thought we could.

"Children’s first and most influential teachers are their parents/family. They play an important foundational role in the child’s learning and achievement. When parents, educators, and caregivers work together in the education and well-being of a child, a partnership is formed that will influence the best possible learning outcomes for the learner."(Utah's Early Childhood Standards, p. 4).

 --Taken from the Time Together website